Petrarch Quotes

I feed my heart with sighs, that's all it asks,
I live on tears, I think I'm born to weep;
I don't complain of that, since in my state
weeping is sweeter than you might believe.

To have displeased evil and ignorant men is the sure sign of genius and virtue...

No one is a man of learning unless he is also a heretic and a madman, and above all , aggressively perverse.

I had got this far, and was thinking of what to say next, and as my habit is, I was pricking the paper idly with my pen. And I thought how, between one dip of the pen and the next, time goes on, and I hurry, drive myself, and speed toward death. We are always dying. I while I write, you while you read, and others while they listen or stop their ears, they are all dying.

Among the many subjects which interested me, I dwelt especially upon antiquity, for our own age has always repelled me, so that, had it not been for the love of those dear to me, I should have preferred to place myself in spirit in other ages, and consequently I delighted in history.

So süß klingt allen Menschen das Wort Freiheit, dass selbst Keckheit und Frechheit überall Anklang finden, weil sie mit der Freiheit einige Ähnlichkeiten haben.

How much I envy you, you greedy earth, who get to clasp the one who’s taken from me, and keep me from the air of her sweet face in which I once found peace from all my war! How

What am I? A scholar? No, hardly that; a lover of woodlands, a solitary, in the habit of uttering disjointed words in the shadow of beech trees, and used to scribbling presumptuously under an immature laurel tree; fervent in toil, but not happy with the results; a lover of letters, but not fully versed in them; an adherent of no sect, but very eager for truth; and because that is hard to find, and because I am a clumsy searcher, often, out of self-distrust, I flee error and fall into doubt, which I hold in lieu of truth. Thus I have finally joined that humble band that knows nothing, holds nothing as certain, doubts everything - outside of the things that it is sacrilege to doubt.

Pace non trovo e non ho da far guerra.

Learning is my sole delight.

Neither exhortations to virtue nor the argument of approaching death should divert us from literature; for in a good mind it excites the love of virtue, and dissipates, or at least diminishes, the fear of death.

If I believed I could free myself, by dying,
from amorous thoughts that bind me to the earth,
I would already have laid these troubled limbs
and their burden in the earth myself:

It did not seem to me to be a time to guard myself
against Love's blows: so I went on
confident, unsuspecting; from that, my troubles
started, amongst the public sorrows

„Жестоко е сред бурени да бъдеш цвете!

...never would I trade for some new shape
that laurel I was first, in whose sweet shade
all other pleasures vanish in my heart.